Queen's bunting found just in time

Royal wrap: Wain and Naysmith directors, right, Alan Naysmith and Jacki Eves, with staff member Duncan Carr, arrange the 60-year-old bunting found in the law firm’s safe on the veranda of the firm’s High St building in preparation for the royal visit.

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Welcome discovery: Wain and Naysmith directors Audrey Seaton, left, Jacki Eves, and Alan Naysmith, with the 60-year-old bunting in the law firm’s safe.

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After six decades locked away on the top shelf of a walk-in safe at Blenheim law firm Wain and Naysmith, royal bunting from the Queen's visit in 1954 will be brought out to welcome her grandson to town.

Director Alan Naysmith said he had gone into the firm's safe, a concrete room built on to the historic property, to find some files when his eye was caught by a parcel on the top shelf.

The parcel was wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and stamped "British Made".

A small booklet on how to store flags was tucked underneath the string.

Written across it in faded ink was "Bunting - Queen's visit, January 1954".

And sure enough, when Naysmith and fellow directors Audrey Seaton and Jacki Eves opened the parcel, there were metres and metres of red, white and blue bunting - and 60 years of dust.

The firm is housed in a historic building on High St and staff will put the bunting up around its first floor veranda for tomorrow's visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and his wife, Catherine.

Naysmith suspected the bunting was used in 1954 by previous owners George Spence and Fergus Paterson, he said.

"I never knew George Spence, I did know Fergus Paterson. He would have been into this thing," Naysmith said.

The parcel had been on the top shelf of the safe since he joined the firm in 1979, Naysmith said.

Spence retired in 1957, and Paterson became Crown solicitor, and was joined at the firm by John Wain and Frank Bremner. Wain retired in 2010, but still consults at Wain and Naysmith.

Naysmith said he remembered the Queen's visit in 1954, which happened just before he started school.

"I remember being at Pollard Park with heaps of people, we were all waving flags."